Andrey Kapustin

Using archival collections of local newspapers in the Donbas region of Ukraine and census data, the project will evaluate to what extent there was pro-Russian “separatism” in the Donbas from 2013-2022. It is an attempt to move away from Kyiv or Moscow-centric narratives, focusing instead on the people of the boundaries between Ukraine and Russia.  Russia’s more recent aggression in Ukraine has been at the center of contemporary historical and political discourse, but little is known about the dynamics within the regions of Eastern Ukraine taken over by “separatists” in […]

Cyn Huang

Few philosophers, even those working in the analytic tradition, would deny that our commonsense ethical views are historically conditioned. For example, witness lively debates about ethical conventionalism, the possible anti-realist implications of ethical diversity, or whether or not the evolutionary history of our moral intuitions give us reason to doubt our evaluative attitudes. Despite this general awareness, however, most philosophical ethicists seem rather uneasy about the connection their discipline bears to historical investigation –– it is not clear what they substantively think about the questions of what insights philosophical ethics […]

Sam Duffy

Interaction between in- and out-groups is foundational to magical realist works. They depict the ways in which the arrival and subsequent impact of colonialism to Latin America forced in-groups to become increasingly wary of out-groups. These works illustrate the impact of colonialism on—and the resilient continuation of—cultures that colonizers would erase, and the resulting shift in communication with outsiders. My project will examine the alteration of out-group interaction following the arrival of colonialism to Latin America as portrayed in the magical realism genre. By conducting a survey of Latin American […]

Diana Choi

The horror genre — malleable, in some ways, to wider cultural shifts — takes up many different forms, conventions, surfaces, and bodies. Of these different horrific figures, zombies are the surface and body of interest for this project. Taking up a general scope of a “post-Romero” genre of zombie films, to instantiate the impact of the George A. Romero zombies films on the genre conventions of the contemporary zombie movie, the monstrosity of these zombies may be obvious, but the goal of this project is to investigate what lies beneath […]

Jake Arft-Guatelli

Duality is a well documented property of operators in classical logic and in algebra. To give an example from natural language, “it’s not the case that it might be raining” sounds equivalent to “it must not be raining”. Generalized work surrounding duality in algebraic settings has only been explored relatively recently, but duality of classical operators for possibility and necessity can be traced back to Aristotle. My project explores the historical, natural language, and computational motivations for modal duality. I plan to depart from the existing literature in focusing on […]

Jacob Li Rosenberg

What are the purposes, possibilities, and limitations of the traditional gallery space? Through understanding who has been excluded from the gallery, we aim to rethink what an exhibition space can and should be. Through our research, we will stage our own space on campus that subverts gallery conventions. We will present an alternative functionality, proposing that the gallery space should offer tangible assets to its community. Our work is a collaborative art project situated in the history of service labor, endurance art performances, gallery culture, and the history of subversive […]

Elizabeth Vergara

This project interrogates narratology’s semiotic scope by decolonizing the various theories from a colonial perspective and exploring historical and cultural dynamics in Chicanx narratives. Through a close reading of Ana Castillo’s memoir Black Dove, I will contribute to existing literature concerning Chicanx narratives and Mexican ballads by deconstructing narrative theory and introducing a historically and culturally relevant perspective that offers an informed understanding of time and place into an analysis of how Chicanx narratives may work out the dynamics of Chicanx identity. I will conduct a comparative analysis of Castillo’s […]

Caitlin Keller

While many know the wicked sea witch Ursula from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, few understand that she was based on the drag queen Divine. Ursula is only one of a myriad of representations of queerness in children’s media. My project explores the evolution of queer representation in children’s media and the role it plays in transforming mainstream cultural norms, working as a tool to socialize children. From the demonization of queer characteristics resulting in queer-coded villains to same-sex kisses on animated television shows of the 21st century, queer representation in […]

Eva Kerins

Working from the traditional canon of Homeric work and analysis, this project will explore the implications of disability, particularly blindness, and its relationships to the landscapes and language of Homer. After broadly defining the classical interpretations of disability, the project will explore how blindness is linguistically represented in Homer’s work and analyze, through research, his life and the landscapes he occupied and illustrated. The project will employ the concept of enargeia, a Homeric idea translated by Alice Oswald as “bright unbearable reality,” to contextualize the representation of blindness as divinely […]

Yassin Oulad Daoud

From the 15th century onward, painters and architects produced views of real urban spaces like city squares using linear perspective. While it is universally accepted that linear perspective allowed these artists to imitate reality to a high degree, scholarship has largely overlooked the fact that these views artificially rectified the often irregular layout of the urban spaces they depict. My project seeks to discover whether there is a systematic difference between real urban spaces and the way in which they were depicted in the age of linear perspective drawing. With […]